Breath

Use in the book

The Stoic definition calls soul intelligent, warm breath. In the explanation of hearing attributed to Empedocles, a current of air strikes a structure within the ear. The anthology thus uses breath-language in accounts of both life and particular bodily processes.

Places to read

1. I.49.1b.1The Stoics define soul as intelligent, warm breath.
2. I.53.1A current of air striking the ear is compared with the action of a bell.
3. I.41.7.5In a Hermetic account, the soul enters breath and sets it in living motion.
4. I.47.9.1Spirit sustains the body within a hierarchy of life.
5. I.47.9.2Its withdrawal is distinguished from the behavior of blood.

Translation in this edition

“Breath” serves the life-bearing and physical sense; “current of air” makes the auditory explanation intelligible. “Soul” is reserved for psychē in these comparisons. “Spirit” is used for pneuma in I.47.9.1–22; the local hierarchy keeps it distinct from soul.

Images and comparisons

The ear’s cartilage is pictured as something that swings and is struck like a bell. The comparison explains the reported mechanism of hearing; it does not give pneuma a symbolic meaning independent of that mechanism.

Breath and spirit

In the Hermetic hierarchy of human life, pneuma carries soul’s activity through veins, arteries, and blood and is rendered “spirit.” Its withdrawal into soul precedes the body’s death. This use differs from both an ordinary current of air and the Stoic definition of soul as warm breath. The English “spirit” here does not identify pneuma with thymos, the spirited element, or with daimōn, a divine spirit.

Use in the book

At evening the air has only a light breath as the fields fall silent. The poet’s breath instead swells words, makes them light, and gives them color, in an image that moves on to tincture and the bee’s honey. The hypothetical atmosphere made from one bubble makes breath animating on a cosmic scale. These shifts retain the smallness and efficacy of breath without identifying every breath-image with a defined theological substance.

Places to read

1. I, p. 70, entry 10, ¶1The evening air breathes lightly as nature grows still.
2. II, p. 478, entry 1, ¶12The poet’s breath changes the weight and color of words.
3. II, p. 836, entry 3, ¶1An animating breath expands a minimal material beginning.

Translation in this edition

The translation keeps “breath” and the hypothetical “could.” It renders animateur as “gives life,” keeping animation rather than an unspecified persuasive influence.

Use in the book

The account of air begins with breathing as an unpriced daily benefit. Later, the comparison between inhalation and exhalation explains praise: no one can return more praise than the benefits received and understood. Breath thus makes dependence compatible with active return. The prayer for the Holy Spirit asks Christ to breathe upon and inspire the soul, so that praises overflow from renewed life. Praises themselves are called the breathings of interior love. The pattern is not mechanical. Understanding and affection transform what is received; they do not merely expel a quantity equal to an intake.

Places to read

1. I.21Breathing exemplifies air’s intimate and indispensable service.
2. I.95The prayer asks for spiritual breathing, inspiration, and enlivening.
3. II.94Breathing supplies an analogy for benefits received and returned in praise.
4. III.82Praises are the breathings of interior love.

In this edition

“Inspire” in the prayer carries the breathing image together with divine animation. The physiology and the spiritual figure remain distinguishable even as Traherne joins them.